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Almost 10 years in the making

“We made an editorial decision to give the world a sneak peek of the image on Instagram,” NASA social media manager John Yembrick wrote in an email to WIRED. “We feel it's important to engage new audiences.”

Nasa

Tuesday - about 7,750 miles above the surface -- roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India - making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth. This stunning image of the dwarf planet was captured from New Horizons at about 4 p.m. EDT on July 13, about 16 hours before the moment of closest approach. The spacecraft was 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers) from the surface. Images from closest approach are expected to be released on Wednesday, July 15.

Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

#nasa #pluto #plutoflyby#newhorizons#solarsystem #nasabeyond #science

NASA posted this image to their Instagram account at 7am and to their website at around 8am EST on July 14, 2015.

This was the first time NASA had announced something on social media prior to announcing it on NASA.gov (or directly to the media, in the days of yore). It was also the first time the world had seen anything close to a clear image of Pluto…

Nasa

We've come a long way since Pluto's discovery in 1930, thanks to @NASANewHorizons #PlutoFlyby: http://go.nasa.gov/1Ht2rRb

...the last planet in our solar system to be photographed.

Ben Gross

Spacecraft New Horizons, launched in 2006 with a mission of collect information on Pluto and the edges of our solar system, took the photo. With the completion of this mission, NASA had visited every planet in our solar system.

And social media brought that experience to the world in near real time.

New Horizons, 9 Years and 3 Billion Miles Leading to #PlutoFlyBy

New Horizons launched on January 19, 2006.

Nasa

It's an unmanned spacecraft the size of a baby grand piano. According to NASA, “The New Horizons mission is helping us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto and by venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt – a relic of solar system formation.”

The spacecraft is the first to explore how these bodies, on the outskirts of our solar system, have evolved over time. Data collected could help inform the story about our system's origins.

Nasa

New Horizons' journey is diagrammed in this lovely image from NASA. (Full PDF, top of p.2)

And the spacecraft started its own Twitter account during this journey, about 11 months before its closest encounter with Pluto:

Nasa New Horizons

The World Reacts

NASA's Pluto portrait on Instagram has 364K likes and was the organization's most successful Instagram post ever, according to John Yembrick, NASA's social media manager. He was the opening keynote speaker at ClickZ Live, where he shared some further statistics:

“Beyond Instagram, NASA posted the Pluto image to Twitter and hosted a TweetChat, #askNASA, where two scientists answered 63 questions in 45 minutes. The space agency also initiated a Facebook Q&A and Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) around planet Pluto to drive engagement.

The results, in Yembrick's own words, were phenomenal. On Twitter, NASA's Pluto post reached around 38.6 million users with total engagements – replies, retweets and favorites – exceeding 65,000; on Reddit, the Pluto conversation is ranked the 14th top Reddit AMA of all time.”

#PlutoFlyBy was the top trend on Twitter on the morning of Tuesday, July 14, 2015.

hannahaielloart

In July 2015, @nasa New Horizons space probe reached Pluto after a nine year journey. Its mission was to conduct a fly by data collection on the dwarf planet. The images released by New Horizons were breathtakingly beautiful. I clearly remember my first glimpse of Pluto's surface, and the goosebumps that traveled up my arms when I glimpsed Pluto's little love note sent from the edge of our solar system.

I've long been inspired by space. When I was two, I used to run around with a bucket on my head pretending to be cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Twenty seven years later, I still spend hours dreaming of space by swooning over @iss and @hubble_spaceInstagram feeds and listening to Neil Degrasse-Tyson's lectures and panel discussions. Creating this drawing has allowed me to conduct my own form of space exploration by spending several hours lost in the icy ranges and craters of Pluto's surface, all the while marveling at mankind's achievement in capturing such celestial beauty. It has been a thrilling journey.

I could gush all day. Instead, let me leave you with an excerpt from Ray Bradbury's poem, 'If Only We Had Taller Been', which he read when the very first unmanned space probe had reached Mars in 1971:

Short man, Large dream
I send my rockets forth between my ears
Hoping an inch of Good is worth a pound of years
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal mall:
We've reached Alpha Centauri!
We're tall, O God, we're tall!

#PlutoFlyBy #pluto #nasa #drawing

Because it's the internet, of course there were jokesters:

Lone Wolf Ligger

I have a bad feeling about this new pic of Pluto.

And corporate community managers stretching to make a trending hashtag relevant to their brand:

Roman at Home

Space is all over the news with the #PlutoFlyby, so let us help YOU save space in the bathroom http://bit.ly/1O5OcDB

Neil deGrasse Tyson

#PlutoFacts: Earth's Moon is five times more massive than Pluto. Get over it.

The #PlutoFlyBy had been planned for months, even years, down to the hour, then the minute as New Horizons got closer and closer. Not all hashtags arise from such scientific precision. NASA planned their social media strategy for the event and benefited from the premeditation.

@NASANewHorizons continues to use #PlutoFlyBy as they share more images, information gleaned, and conclusions drawn from last summer's image collection period.

What We Learned About Pluto

The flyby itself took only a few minutes, with the spacecraft traveling over 30,000 mph as it got to within 8,000 miles of the surface of Pluto.

On the whole, we learned that Pluto is likely 2/3 rock and 1/3 water ice, which behaves like rock because it's so cold where Pluto is within the solar system. Pluto is now officially classified as a rocky body.

Part of the heart area is a fascinating icy plains region named Sputnik Planum (or Sputnik Plain) after Earth's first artificial satellite. It is estimated to be no more than 100 million years old and might be in the process of geological transformation. A NASA press release provides further information, including this:

“The Pluto system surprised us in many ways, most notably teaching us that small planets can remain active billions of years after their formation,” said Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “We were also taught important lessons by the degree of geological complexity that both Pluto and its large moon Charon display.”

Some of the processes on Pluto appear to have occurred geologically recently, including those that involve the water-ice rich bedrock as well as the more volatile, and presumably more mobile, ices of the western lobe of Pluto's “heart.” The diverse geology and apparent recent activity raise fundamental questions about how small planetary bodies remain active many billions of years after formation. The research suggests that other large worlds in the Kuiper belt -- such as Eris, Makemake, and Haumea -- could also have similarly complex histories that rival those of terrestrial planets such as Mars and Earth.

New Horizons shared a graphic on Twitter that illustrates some of the geological activity:

NASA New Horizons

A Space Agency's Work Is Never Done

Sending complex data across 3 billion miles isn't the same thing as streaming Netflix, even if you're stealing your neighbor's WiFi and have a weak connection.

CanberraDSN

Sending to and receiving data from @NASANewHorizons currently takes 4hours 53minutes each way. #DSS43 #PlutoMOM

That thing puts a household router to shame.

During most of the flyby, New Horizons went dark to allocate more resources to collecting data during the short time it had near Pluto and its five moons. (The high resolution Pluto heart image had already been sent back to Earth.)

Half of the data still hadn't been downloaded as of February 26, 2016, more than seven months after the flyby.

The data collection process is explained in an excellent, accessible blog post on the NASA website, written by Emma Birath (who makes for a good #ILookLikeAnEngineer candidate!).

The image of Pluto sending its love to us Earthlings was iconic, but there were many more. And there are likely even more space photos to come.